Dear All, having been working for a couple of weeks with SOGo, I think it's time to share some impressions and thoughts with the community. This is a long post, you've been warned :-)
I'm currently managing a high-availability mail infrastructure for my clients, based on MySQL / Postfix / Dovecot / Roundcube. Since the last year, I've tried hard to integrate CalDAV and CardDAV alongside IMAP services. In this search of the "right" product, SOGo shines when compared with the others: 1) Compared to AtMail, the server part is much more mature and the webmail, although not so elegant, is much more configurable and usable in everyday work. 2) Compared to Zimbra / Zarafa / Bynary / commercial providers, it is less resource-hungry and less expensive. 3) Compared to Roundcube and AtMail, it features an impressive commercial support from Inverse and a general user-friendliness the RC team lacks. When I started submitting feedback from real users to the RC team, sometimes offering funding for fixing bugs, most of my issues were simply ignored or bashed as trivial. For example, when I submitted a request for adding "download message in .EML" button, I was answered "Just look at the message source and save it with the right extension". Sure dude, I'll be happy to teach some hundreds of secretaries spread all along Italy how to look at message sources in their Internet Explorer 7. With SOGo 1.3.5 I was stuck with a bug in MySQL authentication: I got in touch with Ludovic and arranged a debug session. With just 1 hour of paid support, I had my problem resolved -- awesome! That said, are there things that still need to be worked out in SOGo? Sure, and one stands above all: **native Outlook compatibility**. After a couple of presentation held with my clients (some small to mid-sized companies), I can identify a pattern in their responses: "yes, the calendar and webmail are impressive but we won't adopt it unless it fully supports Outlook on Win and Mac". Now, I am well aware of the efforts Inverse is putting into OpenChange, but: 1) OpenChange depends on Samba 4, which is still in alpha 2) OpenChange itself is in alpha 3) In this list, there was a request for a release timeframe on Jan, 24th and no answer 4) I've subscribed to both products' mailing lists and AFAIK there's not much activity going on. The OpenChange website is almost abandoned. So, my question to Inverse is: what is needed in your opinion to make OpenChange production-ready in a reasonable timeframe, say a few months? More developers, financial funding, bug reporting, anything else? If the shortage is on the developers' side, maybe services like Odesk.com can help. And if there are companies planning to build commercial services upon SOGo, maybe Inverse could consider crowdfunding. My company is ready to donate, but I think that should happen within a frame of goals and timelines defined by Inverse. I'm not trying to teach Inverse how to run their business, of course, but I suspect there could be a faster advance in development if interested companies joined their forces. That's my proposal. Thanks to all who had the patience to read until end :-) Regards, Corrado Fiore-- [email protected] https://inverse.ca/sogo/lists
